Effective Notetaking (3rd ed.): Study Skills, #1

By Fiona McPherson

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You can predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of effective study strategies.

This book is for college students who are serious about being successful in study, and teachers who want to know how best to help their students learn.

Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being 'smart'. Research has shown it is possible to predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of study strategies.

This workbook looks at the most important group of study strategies – how to take notes (with advice on how to read a textbook and how to prepare for a lecture). You'll be shown how to:

• format your notes
• use headings and highlighting
• how to write different types of text summaries and pictorial ones, including concept maps and mind maps (you'll find out the difference, and the pros and cons of each)
• ask the right questions
• make the right connections
• review your notes
• evaluate text to work out which strategy is appropriate.

There's advice on individual differences and learning styles, and on how to choose the strategies that are right for both you and the situation.

Using effective notetaking strategies will help you remember what you read. It will help you understand more, and set you on the road to becoming an expert (or at least getting good grades!).

Successful studying isn't about hours put in, it's about spending your time wisely. You want to study smarter not harder.

As always with the Mempowered books, this thorough (and fully referenced) workbook doesn't re-hash the same tired advice that's been peddled for so long. Rather, Effective notetaking builds on the latest cognitive and educational research to help you study for success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayz Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781927166000

Fiona McPherson

Fiona McPherson has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Otago (New Zealand). Her first book, The Memory Key, published in 1999, was written in response to what she saw as a lack of practical advice on how to improve memory and learning skills that was based on the latest cognitive research. Since that time, she has continued to provide such advice, through an extensive website (www.memory-key.com), and several books focused on specific memory and learning skills.

Book preview

book cover

Effective Note-taking

3rd edition

By Dr Fiona McPherson

www.mempowered.com

Published 2018 by Wayz Press, Wellington, New Zealand

Copyright © 2007, 2012, 2018 by Fiona McPherson

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Wayz Press, a subsidiary of Capital Research Limited.

First published 2007

Revised 2012

Revised 2018

ISBN 978-1-927166-00-0

To report errors, please email [e-mail]

For additional resources and up-to-date information about any errors, go to the Mempowered website at www.mempowered.com

Also by Fiona McPherson

How to Revise and Practice (2nd ed.)

Mnemonics for Study (2nd ed.)

Mnemonics for Study with Spanish glossary

Mnemonics for Study with Italian glossary

Successful Learning Simplified: A Visual Guide

How to Approach Learning: What teachers and students should know about succeeding in school

Indo-European Cognate Dictionary

Easy Russian Alphabet: A Visual Workbook

Beginning Ancient Greek

My Memory Journal

Planning to Remember: How to remember what you’re doing and what you plan to do

Perfect Memory Training

The Memory Key

1. Introduction

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First tip! Students (and indeed readers in general) are inclined to ignore Introductions. But these are usually valuable guides to how to read the text and what to expect from it. As you’ll learn in later chapters, knowing what to expect is a vital factor in getting the most from both books and lecturers.

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Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being ‘smart’. Indeed, we can predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of study strategies. Forget intelligence. Forget hours put in. What is important is your use of effective study strategies.

To use a strategy effectively you need to understand how it works. You need to understand:

Why it works

How it works

When it works

When it doesn’t

How to use it effectively

You also need to understand your own learning style, to help you assess whether a particular strategy is right for you.

The effective and long-term use of any memory strategy requires two things:

that you understand why and how and when the strategy works, and

that you practice the strategy enough to achieve mastery.

This workbook is the first in a series of workbooks on study skills. The workbooks build on the information about memory and memory strategies provided in my book The Memory Key, which sets out the principles of how memory works, and how those principles relate to memory strategies. Because The Memory Key aimed to provide an overview of memory strategies across the board, it couldn’t go into depth about specific memory strategies. These workbooks aim to do that for study strategies. They provide more detailed instruction about specific strategies, examples to help you understand more fully how and when to use them, and exercises to provide practice in using them.

This workbook looks at the most important group of study strategies — taking notes. Note-taking encompasses many strategies, not simply the obvious ones such as how to format your notes, use headings and highlighting, how to summarize, how to review your notes, but also the more complex ones of how to evaluate text to work out which strategy is appropriate, and how to ask the right questions.

The distinction between note-taking and active reading (discussed in the next book in the series) is somewhat arbitrary. Reading actively often involves taking notes; taking notes often requires you to read. Some strategies are common to both. One such strategy involves activating prior knowledge in preparation for reading about / taking notes about a subject. This is called priming, and it really does help, especially when the subject matter is difficult or unfamiliar.

So let’s get you primed, to help you get the most out of this book. Think about your answers to the following questions:

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When do you take notes?

Why do you take notes?

Do you have different strategies for taking notes in a lecture and taking notes from a book?

Do you realize notes can be formatted in different ways?

Do you re-write your notes?

If you re-write your notes, do you simply copy them out again, or do you write them in different words, or in a different format?

Do you review your notes?

How do you review your notes?

Do you think skimming is a good strategy or something poor readers do?

Do you have a clear idea of what you want to get out of a text or a lecture beforehand?

In a lecture, do you try to take down everything?

Do you have trouble picking out what is important in a text or lecture?

Do you believe that successful students are simply more intelligent than less successful students?

Do you ‘cram’ before an exam rather than study regularly?

Do you find information only seems to stay in your memory for a short time?

Do you have trouble concentrating?

Do you have trouble sitting still in one place for long?

Do you have trouble holding sufficient information in your head to understand what’s being said?

Do you have different strategies you use for different types of information or when you have different purposes?

When you started this book, did you study the Table of Contents for a few minutes, reflecting on the various topics indicated there?

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The last question is also a hint! If you didn’t study the Table of Contents (and most people don’t, believing that it is only provided as a type of index — a place to direct you if you’re looking for something specific), then I recommend you go back and look at it. I’ve deliberately provided a lot of sub-headings, so you can get a reasonable idea of what is covered in this book.

I’m not suggesting you pick and choose what interests you, because I think you will be surprised by some of the information for topics you may think are ‘beneath’ you (like highlighting), and the chapters do build on each other. But as I’ve just suggested, preparing your mind before reading a text is an important part of successful learning, and the Table of Contents is a good place to start.

Okay. I hope these questions and the Table of Contents have got you thinking about your current note-taking style, your problems, and what you want from this book. Let’s dive in.

2. Making note-taking an effective strategy

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If you don’t understand how note-taking helps you — what its purpose really is — then you won’t be able to properly direct your efforts to making your note-taking effective. If you don’t understand the factors that can limit that effectiveness, then you won’t be dealing with those factors effectively. In this brief chapter, I look at the purposes of note-taking, and why the limitations of working memory need to be taken into account.

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Note-taking is probably the most common study strategy. Everyone takes notes — not everyone knows how to do it well. Research into the effectiveness of note-taking has found — surprise, surprise — that sometimes note-taking helps you remember information, and sometimes it doesn’t¹.

So what factors make note-taking an effective strategy? Let’s start by looking at what note-taking is all about. First, a couple of distinctions to help define what note-taking is.

The first distinction is that between note-taking from note-making. We take notes from a book or a lecture; we make notes as preparation for an essay or presentation or exam, or to clarify our thoughts. Although this book is mainly about note-taking (about which most research has been done), some of the discussion — especially the section on concept maps — is relevant to note-making.

The other distinction we need to make is one within note-taking — the difference between taking notes from a lecture and taking notes from a book. Again, following the research, I talk mostly about note-taking from books. It is much easier to practice effective note-taking strategies from written texts before moving on to the much more challenging situation of a lecture. I discuss recommendations for taking lecture notes in chapter 10.

Okay, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at what note-taking is about.

Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful

Most people believe notes are to provide a written record of information they want to remember, but although that is certainly important, research reveals the main value of note-taking is through its effect on how you encode the information in your brain. That is, the act of note-taking is more important than the result.

For this reason, note-taking is effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes² — in other words, to the extent that you put the information in your own words. Verbatim notes (where you have recorded information word-for-word) are of minimal value, unless of course you are simply using them as a stepping stone and later paraphrase and reorganize them.

Several factors affect whether or not note-taking is effective:

the density / complexity of the information

the style of the presentation (for example, a very formal, ‘dry’ text is more likely to be recorded verbatim while a more informal passage is more likely to be paraphrased — and thus more effectively recorded)

how well the information is organized by the presenter

how skilled you are at taking notes (in particular, your skill at capturing the most important points)

And in the case of taking lecture notes, we must add another factor:

how fast the information is presented (note-taking is more likely to aid recall if presentation rate is slow and you can review your notes)

Of course, all these factors interact. How well the material needs to be organized depends on your skill; how much complexity you can deal with depends on skill, prior knowledge, and working memory capacity; how much density/complexity is manageable depends on the style of the text and how well it’s organized.

And all of these depend on a specific skill component: your knowledge of which strategy is most effective, for you, in the specific situation.

This book will teach you not only what strategies are effective and when, but how to assess the presented material in order to determine the most effective strategy, and how to choose the right strategy for you.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the personality factor. Although personal styles and abilities are something you need to take into account when considering which strategies will be most effective for you, effective strategies are effective strategies, regardless of the user. Moreover, it’s a mistake to simply go with the strategies you are most comfortable with. Indeed, research suggests that the most effective strategies are often those you are initially not particularly comfortable with.

But there is one personal attribute that you should take into account when considering your approach to learning and using these strategies, and that is your working memory capacity. So before we go any further, I want to discuss this.

The importance of working memory

Working memory governs your ability to comprehend what you are reading or hearing, your ability to learn new words, your ability to reason, your ability to plan and organize yourself, and much more.

Working memory capacity (the amount you can ‘hold’ in working memory) varies between people, and indeed, WMC correlates highly with fluid intelligence (fluid intelligence refers to general reasoning and problem-solving abilities, while crystallized intelligence refers to cognitive functions associated with knowledge).

In fact, a study³ found that a student’s ability to take good notes and benefit from them is better predicted by his working memory capacity than by his grade point average or his score on the American College Test. The notes of students with a high working memory capacity were fuller, with more complex propositions, more main ideas, and more words.

A student with a low working memory capacity also has more trouble understanding text. Part of the reason for this is a reduced ability to make inferences.

When reading, we make inferences all the time. Such inferences may require knowledge out of our memory, or may require us to make connections between statements within the text. To do this, we have to be able to hold all the relevant information in our mind at the same time — a task more difficult for those who can ‘hold’ less in working memory.

Indications are that students with a low working memory capacity use less effective strategies when reading because such strategies are less demanding⁴.

So what is working memory, and why does it have this effect?

What working memory is

To put information into our long-term memory store, we must encode it, which means, for the most part, we must actively process it — work on it. This we term being in working memory. Essentially, being in working memory is a way of saying information is currently being worked on. It’s not necessary, by the way, for all of this to be conscious, although mostly it will be.

Similarly, when we retrieve information — get it out of the memory store / remember it — the information again passes through this state of consciousness, this working memory.

But here we come to the nub of the issue. Our long-term memory store is incredibly large, but the amount we can process at any one time — the amount we can hold in working memory — is very very small.

Working memory capacity and the magic number seven

Probably the most widely known ‘fact’ about working memory is that it can only hold around seven chunks of information (between 5 and 9). Actually, the situation is even worse than that. Recent research is now converging on the idea that working memory can only hold four items, of which only one is in your ‘focus of attention’ at any one time. But it seems likely that you can also hold another three or so items in a state of readiness, ready to jump into working memory. So, as long as you keep all these items circulating (by, for example, muttering them under your breath, or just by keeping your mind circling through them all) then you have your effective capacity of seven.

Regardless, this tells us little about the limits of working memory because the size of a chunk is indeterminate.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 are seven different chunks — if you remember each digit separately (as you would, for example, if you were not familiar with the digits — as a young child isn’t). But for those of us who are only too well-versed in our numbers, 1 through to 7 could be a single chunk.

In any case, recent research suggests that it is not so much the number of chunks that is important. What may be more important is how long it takes you to say the words (information is usually held in working memory in the form of an acoustic, sound-based, code). It appears that you can only hold in working memory what you can say in 1.5 — 2 seconds. Slow speakers are therefore penalized. (This also explains why we tend to talk very fast when we have a lot of information we want to disgorge).

There’s more than one working memory

But what we term working memory is not a single entity. It contains several functions, including the central executive which coordinates and manages the various tasks needed.

The extent to which working memory is domain-specific (different working memories, if you like, for different sensory and cognitive systems, such as language, spatial memory, number) is still very much debated. However, there is a reasonable consensus that verbal and visuospatial information have different stores. This is important, because it means you can increase the amount of information you’re currently holding by using both systems. For example, when I need to remember, say, a phone number and a name, I’ll repeat one while holding the other as a visual image — writing the name, as it were, on a mental whiteboard.

But the most important part of working memory, it now appears, is the executive control — your ability to control attention; your ability to concentrate and not be distracted by competing demands.

Working memory is about attention

We tend to focus on the more deliberate concentration ability when we think of attention, but these two aspects of attention are both important, and indeed, it may be that the ability to ignore irrelevant information is the more important.

In fact, it may be that working memory capacity is only critical when there’s interference⁵ — suggesting that the ability to ignore competing demands is the really critical part of attention.

Of course, interference comes from many sources — not just distractions in the environment, but things happening in your mind. Anxiety⁶ or any strong emotion (love!) is distracting. Thoughts about what you plan to do later, or decisions you haven’t made yet, can be distracting. Trying to do two things at once can be distracting. But these are just the obvious sources of distraction. Simply having dual goals can be a source of interference — for example, taking notes for an essay, while simultaneously thinking you might as well include information you might need for a future exam.

Most importantly and least obviously, conflicting, inconsistent, or merely different, information is a source of interference. For example, holding your goal in mind while you study is a possible source of interference. Reading about one thing and going on to another, if you’re not completely sure how they’re connected (if indeed they are connected), is a possible source of interference. Think of information gathering as rolling a snowball. As long as the information all sticks together in a coherent, consistent, meaningful ball, you’re fine. But anything that doesn’t fit into your ball is going to cause problems.

This has important implications for note-taking. One of these has to do with the cognitive load of your text or lecture. The cognitive load is the extent to which the material makes demands on working memory. There are two parts to it: intrinsic (how difficult the material is) and extrinsic (how it’s presented). Research suggests⁷ that the format of the material is only important when the intrinsic load is high — that is, when the material is reasonably difficult. Of course, what is difficult for one person may be easy for another — difficulty level is entirely subjective.

What all this means is that there is no one best strategy for taking notes. Which strategy will be the most effective depends on your working memory capacity, the distractions in your mind or the environment (your temporary functional WMC as it were), the (subjective) difficulty of the text, and the way the information is presented. Which is why it takes me a whole book to lay it all out!

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Conditions for effective note-taking

Skill at note-taking

Slow or self-determined rate of presentation

Well-organized material

Material that is not too difficult for the strategy and the student’s skill

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Main points

Taking notes is only effective if the student has sufficient note-taking skill to deal with the learning material.

Note-taking is primarily a tool to encode information effectively in your memory.

Your working memory capacity affects your ability to take notes.

You can hold more information in working memory by forming information into cohesive ‘chunks’, and by using both verbal and visual memory systems.

How much information you can ‘hold’ in working memory is affected by your ability to ignore irrelevant information.

Cognitive load is the extent to which the material makes demands on working memory.

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Review questions

The main value of taking notes is

to provide a written record

to help you organize your material

to provide a verbatim record

to help you understand your material

to help you put the information into your own words, in a way that helps you understand it

Whether or not your note-taking is effective depends on

the writer’s / lecturer’s skill at organizing the material

how well you can adapt to the way in which the material is presented

how difficult the material is

your skill at picking out the most important points

your knowledge of note-taking strategies, and your skill at applying them appropriately

Your working memory capacity affects

how much you can think about

how well you can organize yourself

how much you can understand of what you’re reading or listening to

how easily you learn

how smart you are

You can’t do anything about the limitations of your working memory capacity    T  /  F

Working memory capacity is

crucial for academic achievement

just another way of thinking about attention

crucial when there are competing demands on your attention

affected by the amount of distraction in your environment

affected by the amount of distraction in your own thoughts

affected by how well you know what you’re doing

PART I:

Selection strategies

The first and most crucial part of effective note-taking is about selecting what information is important.

Anything that helps you select the most important information is good.

Distinguishing the important from the unimportant information is arguably the most critical skill in successful studying. It is the foundation upon which all the other skills rest. Unfortunately, no-one has yet come up with an effective way of teaching this skill. Many people might indeed argue that it is not a skill, but an ability.

Although I agree that the ability to pick out what is important is in many ways the essence of intelligence, I certainly don’t agree that it can’t be taught. It is merely that, like any other skill, some people will learn it easily (in some cases without any direct instruction), while others will need more help and more practice.

But even those who may have picked up their selection skills without obvious effort, would benefit from some direct instruction and focused practice.

I say that no-one knows how to teach the ability to select the most important information, and in the most fundamental sense that is true. But information that is expressed in writing or in speech, in textbooks and lectures, commonly contains clues to what the writer or speaker regards as important. Reading these cues is certainly something that can be taught.

There are also conditions that make selection more difficult, and if you understand these, you will know when to apply a greater degree of attention to the material.

Successful selection requires understanding, but you don’t have

Reviews for Effective Notetaking (3rd ed.)

[laatukone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book gives a pretty good idea as to why notes should be taken, what the steps to taking notes are, what kinds of notes one could make, and how to choose which kind of notes to make.
The book is mostly aimed to students, and to taking notes from written texts, but notetaking during lectures is also covered.
Lots of exercises with example answers provided, although going to the end of the book to read about them is a bit clumsy with the Scribd UI.